Green Cities in the U.S.

I was listening to the KEXP radio "Mind over Matters" podcast and heard a great interview with a guy named Warren Karlenzig who is the director of a group called SustainLane. That group has made a ranking of U.S. cities for sustainability. It's nice to see that, although not in the top 3, Chicago received a fairly high score, and Minneapolis did well too. They looked at a variety of data in 15 categories so some cities will be stronger in certain areas than others, like less urban sprawl or more farmers markets, etc.

Check out the SustainLane website for details. There is also a link to a fun animation series of a family called "The Unsustainables". About a dozen episodes of 2 and a half minute shorts that feature rooftop gardens turned golf course and solar panels used for self tanning. Kind of like a Conjunction Junction (<--YouTube) for the 21st Century maybe??

Words per minute

Starting last week, I decided to look into learning to type using the Dvorak keyboard configuration to replace QWERTY. I had read about the history of QWERTY and Dvorak a couple years ago, but it was right around the time I moved to Tokyo so I sidelined the project for later. However, now that my job involves quite a lot of typing, I decided to give it another shot (and, yes, I'm using Dvorak to type this post).

(click on keyboard for the wiki page on Dvorak)

For a fun primer on what the Dvorak configuration is, check out this 'zine (www.dvzine.org), but to put it simply, it's an alternative keyboard layout to replace the random QWERTY layout that was designed in 1873 for the original typewriters. Dvorak, developed in the 1930s, is a logical configuration increasing efficiency, putting the most commonly used keys--including all the vowels--on the home row, and maintaining left-right balance by putting vowels on the left and common consonants on the right. It is proven to reduce errors and muscle fatigue (see RSI), and improves typing speed. Actually, I had noticed some pain in my hands and forearms a couple weeks ago which I had suspected was from typing, and that jarred my memory about Dvorak.
For now, as I relearn touch-typing, I am typing more slowly than I'm used to, but as I practice I find it's getting easier and the keystrokes make much more sense; no more semi-colon on the home row (now it's where the Z key was). I have probably put about 5 hours of practice in thus far, and they say you can get back up to speed (40 wpm) after about 18 hours of practice.
In any case, the story of the inventor of QWERTY, Christopher Latham Sholes, is an interesting one and worth reading. The sheer ridiculousness of still using a layout that became obsolete by 1878 with the advent of a spring-loaded typebar alone converted me. And since configuring a computer keyboard for Dvorak is already built into Mac and Windows, I'm well on my way. Wanna join me? Click here to add the keyboard setting (no installation required).